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There is something very appropriate about Ralph Peters’ new column having the title “The Lies of Gaza.” That is, it is an appropriate description of several of the claims Peters makes, and would represent a remarkable case of truth in advertising, except that the title is supposed to refer to other claims that Peters is […]

There is something very appropriate about Ralph Peters’ new column having the title “The Lies of Gaza.” That is, it is an appropriate description of several of the claims Peters makes, and would represent a remarkable case of truth in advertising, except that the title is supposed to refer to other claims that Peters is supposedly debunking. Almost everything that Peters has to say about the conflict can be refuted by these lines from Fisk’s latest:

And history was quite forgotten. The Hamas rockets were the result of the food and fuel siege; Israel broke Hamas’s own truce on 4 and 17 November.

In other words, the central claims that support the conventional “pro-Israel” argument for the conflict are either unfounded or misleading. The “lies of Gaza” are, on the whole, the claims made by defenders of the military operation. Naturally, these small problems with the story Peters is trying to tell do not slow him down. What has been absolutely crucial to support for this effort here in America is the characteristically short American attention span. For most people, there is little or no awareness of the details of what has been happening in another part of the world until the conflict breaks out, at which point the most simplistic and digestible explanation gains the widest currency with a big assist from journalists and pundits who have been conditioned by the last several years of “war on terror” etiquette to endorse any actions deemed necessary for anti-terrorist purposes.

It has been typical that the siege never appears in any supporter’s account of the origins of the conflict. The people who lament very loudly whenever Russia reduces its gas subsidy to Ukraine–because this is supposed to be considered cruel and horrible economic oppression!–are curiously the same ones who do not so much as blink at the blockading of over a million people from the outside world for years. The former is outrageous aggression, you see, while the other is so perfectly acceptable that it need not even be mentioned in discussing the current round of fighting. Indeed, Peters does not mention it even in passing with the sort of dismissive lip service that one has come to expect from militarists. The miserable fate of most of Dr. Abu al-Aish’s family, which has become one of the most well-known episodes of needless suffering in this conflict, accuses every apologist who has tried to minimize or explain away civilian deaths during this operation.

This brings me back to something Prof. Mearsheimer said in the cover story for the new issue:

Moreover, discourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims.

It has taken longer than a few years to drive me from that position of complete sympathy, which I once held approximately ten years ago, to one where I have become increasingly critical. Believe it or not, I used to believe all the standard political pieties that The Wall Street Journal issued about this subject, and I grew up in what could only have been described as a “pro-Israel” home. At the time, I was a teenager and not terribly well-informed. Then I actually learned something beyond the regular talking points on the subject, and at the same time I was generally becoming very skeptical of entangling alliances of all kinds. It became increasingly clear, especially as I watched duelling protests between Israel and Palestine supporters here on campus during the second intifada, that Americans should not take either side and that the conflict was none of our concern. It followed quite readily from this realization that there was absolutely no reason to take the side of the far more powerful party to the conflict at the expense of a long-suffering refugee population.

I would not describe the conflict simply as one of victimizer and victim. That is in its way an equally easy way out of the predicament, and it partakes of the same moralistic strain in our foreign policy thinking that we need to root out rather than take in another direction. I happen to find the language of victimhood misleading, just as I find the adoption of the poisonous phrase “moral clarity” by either side to be distorting, because both sides very much want to engage in victimization and strike poses of self-righteousness. The Balkan Wars–and Western media and government treatment of these wars–taught me to steer clear of this kind of loaded terminology and self-serving narratives. In the official version of the Balkan Wars, they were not conflicts between mutually antagonistic nationalist causes stained by previous crimes and embittered by memories of brutality from WWII, but were a contest between glorious Western, multiethnic democratic capitalism and evil Slavic fascists, and this justified any number of crimes against innocent Serbs as a result. That this was not only an overly simplified picture, but actually almost a reversal of the reality, need not detain us here. Conflicts such as these are tragic because all parties have some claim to being in the right, and all parties continually mistake that partial claim to be a complete vindication. The consistent American mistake is not simply that we involve ourselves in conflicts where we have no real interest at stake, but in adopting entirely the myths and narratives of one side.

One of the common refrains, which Peters also makes, is that critics of the operation had no alternative for the Israeli government–what would you have them do? India’s non-military response to far worse terrorist outrages during one extended attack in November offers an obvious and telling counter-example of how a government in a similar situation might respond. Obviously, just about everyone in the U.S. condemns the atrocities in Mumbai, and I assume pretty much everyone believes that India has a right to defend itself, but India’s genuine restraint in the wake of a massacre of hundreds of people in one of their largest cities stands as a rebuke to all those who claim that Israel’s government had no choice but to resort to force. India could have responded with military strikes inside Pakistan with much greater justification, and like Israel’s government PM Singh’s government is standing for election in the early part of this year and had all the same political incentives to shore up a reputation for national security to fend off a challenge from the nationalists, but Singh seems to have quite correctly understood the disastrous consequences this could have for India, Pakistan and the entire region. Olmert, desperate for a comeback at any price, couldn’t have cared less about the consequences, while Singh, who may still have a political future, is not ready to bestow a failed policy on his country just to gain some votes in the short term. As it turns out, Olmert’s party is probably not going to benefit from this after all, just as I suspected it would not.

Many people were making nervous comparisons to the July crisis of 1914 after the attacks in Mumbai; no one in the world really believes that the conflict in Gaza could precipitate a wider war. The imbalance of power is so glaring that it is not remotely possible that any other state will come to the direct aid of the Palestinians. Something that is quite revealing in this comparison is the recognition of how unimportant the Israel-Palestine conflict really is: Israel can act more or less with impunity against neighboring peoples because there is little chance of a regional conflagration resulting, while India is constrained by geopolitical realities from pursuing a retaliatory course against the group(s) responsible for the atrocities in Mumbai. It is much more useful to look at things this way, which is to acknowledge the vast imbalance of power between the two sides, rather than to dwell on the idea of victimizer and victim.

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